Iceland’s Vanishing Beauty by Michael Kienitz

Michael Kienitz, has been a photographer for over forty years. His traditional photography has appeared in Life, Time, and Newsweek, Elle, Rolling Stone and other major publications worldwide. For ten years Kienitz photographed a variety of conflicts around the world. Recently he changed his subject from people to landscape.

His next exhibitions, titled “Iceland’s Vanishing Beauty,” that he will share glaciers in an exhibition coming September 13th to the Chazen Art Museum at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The exhibition is about Kienitz’s five-year work collecting images from southeast Iceland and captures some of the ice caves and glacial formations in the region’s glacial tongues.

It all happened 5 years ago, when Kienitz was visiting Iceland for the first time. He was on a guided tour to see the ice caves, when the guide took out his phone to share a gorgeous photo of an ice cave. The guide told him, that two years ago, the glacier was where he stood. Iceland’s glacial ice is melting, due in large part to climate change. That is what inspired Kienitz, to capture the landscape before it vanishes.

Kienitz calls upon his deep photographic experience to capture this incredible but disappearing landscape of active volcanoes, ice caves, beaches, canyons, waterfalls, wetlands, black sands, and mountains, all created by the combined forces of rivers, glacial ice, and volcanic and geothermal activity.

He hopes that the pictures will have more impact on people than statistics from scientists.

We hope we will be able to see a photo exhibition in Höfn as soon as possible.